About the time Helio Castroneves was composing himself enough on pit road to deliver the quote of the day about being runner-up at Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, a cousin of mine was going up 3-nil in a second-round match at the Benld, Ill., Italian-American Days bocce tournament.

He thought he had it won, too. The stakes, of course, were a slightly different in a town halfway between St. Louis and Springfield, Ill., than they were at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

A $20 buy-in, plus an understood round of beers paid for by the losers, put a team of two into the double-elimination excuse to spend the afternoon on a yard game that involves tossing grapefruit-sized balls to see who can get closest to a smaller ball tossed as a marker. Among the competition, just one game over, was a woman with a two-pack-a-day voice and a running dialog comparing and contrasting the bagna cauda at this festival to the bread-dipping recipes she’d had in her day. When an opposing player buried a ball in a Benld City Park road, missing the mark by a good 10 or 15 yards, my cousin turned and smiled: “We’ve got this.”

Twenty minutes later my cousin, his white Benld Italian American Club shirt stained with red sauce from serving spaghetti much of the day, was at the park’s shelter, buying a round at the beer stand. Turns out, he didn’t have it: “Well, that kind of sucked.”

Castroneves was channeling the same thought — or maybe it was vice versa — a few hundred miles away. In an instant classic, the three-time Indy 500 winner traded the lead with eventual champion Ryan Hunter-Reay several times over the final 10 laps, only to come up a car-length behind at the finish.

“Frustrating to be so close to something that only a few guys did,” Castroneves told reporters afterward, contemplating how 0.06 seconds equaled a missed chance to join the list of four-time Indy 500 winners, including A.J. Foyt, Al Unser and Rick Mears. “It’s interesting when second place kind of sucks.”

It is interesting. And frustrating. And everything in between for the first loser.

I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve always felt for those finishing just out of contention, obscure to history as victors celebrate. Maybe it’s an extended underdog syndrome, not knowing when to let go when the big game is over. (Not that Castroneves is anyone’s underdog.)

Or maybe it’s because some of my earliest sports memories were watching the St. Louis Blues lose in the Stanley Cup finals three consecutive years. When hockey fans see Boston Bruins great Bobby Orr flying across the crease, parallel to the ice like some sort of Superman in one of the most iconic photos in sports, they see the jubilation of scoring the clinching goal in overtime to win the Cup in 1970. But in Ray Lussier’s photo, I see Blues goalie Glenn Hall, glove hand clinging to top of the crossbar, his body corkscrewed deep in the goal, trying to pirouette out of the net. I see defenseman Noel Picard, stick lifted after sending Orr into the air, circling back in disgust.

I see second place etched in time.

I see Castroneves slumped over the wheel, helmet still on, working up a post-race comment he’d rather not say.

“Second doesn’t really count, you know?” Hunter-Reay said after the race, recounting the chances he took to win.

“I had a good time; I enjoyed it and some people cringe when I say that because how can you enjoy running second?” Mears said. “I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had won it. But that was one of the few times people knew second place was there.”

Like Mears, Castroneves has something most other second place finishers don’t have. His face is on the Borg-Warner Trophy — three times. He drives for one of the greatest owner in Indy 500 history, in Roger Penske. And his reputation as a smiling, good-natured guy is cemented in Indianapolis.

The fact that he was able to mask the pain of coming so close to winning for a fourth time might not be the consolation he was looking for at the biggest race in motorsports. (The $785,194 he took home probably eased the pain a bit, I’m sure.) But keeping things together and focusing on the fact that he was in the picture at the end? That’s video worth showing the kids.

Second place does kind of suck. For my cousin, nursing the hurt of a bocce tourney lost in central Illinois, second place would have been a big improvement — it might have felt like victory compared to two-games-and-out. (The Italian-American Days bocce tourney ended, by the way, in a five-way tie in the men’s division, due to darkness. So there you go.)

His day done, he suggested I bring 20 bucks and a partner next year. Sign-up is at noon, games start at 1. The unspoken promise: You can finish second or worse with us. We’ll meet you at the beer stand, right next to where the free spaghetti is served.